I learned last week (via Arts & Letters Daily) that the Left Behind series of apocalyptic novels by Jerry Jenkins and Tim LaHaye is selling as well as ever despite having come to a conclusion a couple of years ago with a sixteenth installment. An essay by Frank Schaeffer in the online magazine Killing the Buddha (need an explanation of the title? I did. It’s here) explores the mentality that produces and consumes these books. I know nothing of Schaeffer, but what he has to say strikes me as insightful and useful. He writes with an insider’s understanding of apocalyptic evangelicalism and an apostate’s rueful candor.

Some years ago I became aware of these books while working in a used-book store. The owner had arranged a shelf of them up front, right across from the cash register, and there was a brisk trade in them. People would come in to pick up one or more of them, and a week or two or four later would return to swap them for the next ones. Then I read something about the astounding sales figures they were racking up. I decided I would read a few and see what the fuss was about. I got through eight or nine of them. Unless you are a particular sort of person, they are not at all edifying or enjoyable. I wrote this at the time:

There is no literary pretense about these books. The plot, so far is it from ingenious, is foreordained; the characters are puppets, passing as moderately sentient stick figures; the writing itself is at an eighth-grade level. The narrative structure is reminiscent of the Cadets’ 1957 hit “Stranded in the Jungle”: “Meanwhile, back in the jungle…; Meanwhile, back in the States…; Meanwhile, back in the jungle…”. The TV-inspired quick-cut method eliminates the need for sustained dramatic or character development while enabling the most attention-span-challenged reader to stay with it. Clumsy flashbacks provide most of the exposition needed to set contexts and sketch in the world-historical background….

In the compressed language of the Bible the judgments [in the Book of Revelation] have a certain mythic grandeur, but turned into prose by literalists they become, well, prosaic, not to say silly. The image of millions of giant ghostly horsemen riding over the earth to strike down a third of mankind has force and resonance when taken as a trope that it utterly lacks when the characters of a novel are made to see them galloping over Mount Prospect, Illinois.

(Bad writing has its own rewards, to be sure. Do you love bathos? “[They] held hands. Rayford knew global terror was entirely new to Amanda.” My favorite moment: One character says to another, “I’ll be frank, Buck.” I just want to shout “Great! And I’ll be Clyde Beatty.”)

But of course the authors of the books never intended to vie for a Pulitzer Prize. The books are pulp fiction for a targeted market segment, with which they have enjoyed enormous success. What is it about that segment that makes it so precisely targetable?

Mr. Schaeffer notes the unintended irony of the title “Left Behind”:

The evangelical/fundamentalists, from their crudest egocentric celebrities to their “intellectuals” touring college campuses trying to make evangelicalism respectable, have been left behind by modernity. They won’t change their literalistic anti-science, anti-education, anti-everything superstitions, so now they nurse a deep grievance against “the world.”

This raises a chicken-and-egg sort of question: Does embrace of that particular religious doctrine cause people to be “left behind,” or is it embraced by those who have been left or have fallen behind for other reasons? It could go either way, or both, but I’m more inclined to look on class resentment as the plow that prepares the field for the fundamentalist weed. That is why, I think, that descriptions of Rapture and Armageddon, and these books especially, are so rich in lurid visions of the horrors to be visited – soon – upon “them.”

Man, we have long been told, desires to know, which is relief from uncertainty. But he doesn’t necessarily desire to think, which is work. And that’s how dogma was born. Dogmas come in myriad forms, and any given dogma necessarily denies all the others. It is only required that it provide an easily mastered explanation of why things are as they are and an apparently simple way to change them. Fascism, Communism, Peronism, Maoism, Christianism (as Andrew Sullivan has labeled it, to distinguish it from mainstream Christianity) – all offer the left behind, the poor, the improvident, the unintelligent, the unlucky, the systematically excluded a way of focusing their anger and frustration. In the hands of the charlatans and main chancers who invariably find their ways to the head of such movements, they become simmering dangers to peaceful society. Amid the turmoil, the panderers can make a pretty good buck.

What chiefly unites all the -isms of history is the complete absence of humility. The leaders have none, the panderers have none, and they work hard to expunge any trace of it in their followers. We know, is the message; we know for certain, absolutely, and to disagree with what we know is to err, to blaspheme, to court damnation in Eternity and our hatred in this world. In some circles this might be thought of as a form of empowerment, but of course it is in fact a more than usually guileful form of enslavement. No thanks is owed those who contrive and sustain it.